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The Titanic

Captain Edward Smith went down with his ship. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The sinking of the RMS Titanic, as painted by Willy Stöwer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You all know what happened to the Titanic, so I won’t tell you the story, only how it happened and what could have saved the crew and passengers.

It turns out many things would have saved them. Mainly, it was because of the lifeboats. The Titanic was perfectly equipped to carry 64 lifeboats, which each could carry 40 passengers, meaning if the Titanic was equipped with all its possible lifeboats they could carry in total 4,000 people, and only 2.5 thousand people were aboard the ship. The ships owners decided it was only necessary to carry 20 lifeboats.

Something else that would have saved the ship, or at least give more time for everyone to get off, is the metal. You remember the Bessemer process? Well, the Titanic was made of steel, and the process that turned Iron into Steel was performed in Scotland. You see, Scotland is very humid, and when the bubbles were run through the molten metal, the carbon would not hook on to the Oxygen because there was already a lot of Hydrogen hanging onto it. So the Iron did not turn into steel, and stayed brittle.

I mean, you don’t expect a steel plate an inch and a half thick to bust when hit with a chunk of ice, do you? If the ship had better metal, it would dent instead of crack, and the water would go in much slower, giving much more time for the passengers to get off.

And this ship was huge. In the first photo, there is a tiny figure leaning against the ship, underneath the propeller. He looks tiny, as big as this letter: l .And the ship he’s leaning against is not the Titanic, it’s an even smaller ship, the Olympic.